It’s been increasingly clear since then that there are both environmental and — obviously — ethical advantages to using technology to sustain omnivory on a crowding planet. This presumes humans will not all soon shift to a purely vegetarian lifestyle, even though there are signs of what you might call “peak meat” (consumption, that is) in prosperous societies (Mark Bittman wrote a nice piece on this). Given dietary trends as various cultures rise out of poverty, I would say it’s a safe bet meat will remain a favored food for decades to come.

The beef was grown in a lab by a pioneer in this arena — Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands. My colleague Henry Fountain has reported the details in a fascinating news article. Here’s an excerpt followed by my thoughts on next steps in what I see as an important area of research and development:

According to the three people who ate it, the burger was dry and a bit lacking in flavor. One taster, Josh Schonwald, a Chicago-based author of a book on the future of food [link], said “the bite feels like a conventional hamburger” but that the meat tasted “like an animal-protein cake.”

But taste and texture were largely beside the point: The event, arranged by a public relations firm and broadcast live on the Web, was meant to make a case that so-called in-vitro, or cultured, meat deserves additional financing and research…..

Dr. Post, one of a handful of scientists working in the field, said there was still much research to be done and that it would probably take 10 years or more before cultured meat was commercially viable. Reducing costs is one major issue — he estimated that if production could be scaled up, cultured beef made as this one burger was made would cost more than $30 a pound.

The two-year project to make the one burger, plus extra tissue for testing, cost $325,000. On Monday it was revealed that Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, paid for the project. Dr. Post said Mr. Brin got involved because “he basically shares the same concerns about the sustainability of meat production and animal welfare.”

The enormous potential environmental benefits of shifting meat production, where feasible, from farms to factories were estimated in “Environmental Impacts of Cultured Meat Production,”a 2011 study in Environmental Science and Technology. The researchers acknowledged that their calculation was a rough estimate, but the core findings show just how big a difference there could be even accounting for error:

The ethical benefits are important to consider, as well. It’d be hard to find any argument that can justify the conditions in which animals are routinely raised for slaughter today in the concentrated, industrial-style form of husbandry that is required to provide cheap meat to growing and increasingly prosperous populations.

Of course there can be a very different approach to livestock rearing. At 15, my younger son has been working this summer as an intern at the Glynwood Center, an organization based at a working farm in the Hudson Valley that focuses on sustaining productive rural landscapes and agricultural economies.

Jack has been face to face each day with pigs that will end up as ham or chops, but that are well tended through their lives. When they are slaughtered, the process is undertaken as carefully and painlessly as possible. But it is slaughter, nonetheless.

It’s no surprise that Jack, while still an omnivore, has shifted markedly away from pork and beef. He had already moved in this direction without a lot of pressure from my wife and me. For years, while still eating chicken on occasion, he’s been enjoying meatless Chik’n Nuggets in place of actual chunks of processed chicken.

My guess is that supermarkets a generation from now, while still having a butcher section, will offer far more options with meat-like names such as “Chik’n” than true lab-grown meats.

But it’s great to see researchers like Mark Post, and entrepreneurs like Sergey Brin, pushing hard to refine basic processes for meat cultivation.

I still think the first profitable slaughter-free meat will be lab-grown “fowl-free foie gras.”

What’s your prediction?

Updates below |

Why is #culturedbeef important? Shifting away from grain-fed beef could feed over 350 million more people @Revkin //t.co/98VeFegbEV

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.